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SGI Files Chapter 11 Bankruptcy
audi100quattro writes "The WSJ has a story about SGI filing for bankruptcy, but the SGI Investor's Relation page doesn't say anything." Nothing else really known at this point, but this is not unexpected.
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Silicon Graphics Files
For Chapter 11 Protection
A WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE NEWS ROUNDUP
May 8, 2006 6:56 a.m.
Silicon Graphics Inc., a long-struggling maker of high-performance computers, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
A group of bondholders agreed to trade their debt for a stake in the company, which filed for Chapter 11 protection Monday morning in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan.
SGI is known for desktop workstations and larger server systems that are favored by engineers and others who demand sophisticated graphics, including Hollywood studios. But the company has suffered a long slide, partly due to competition from machines based on standard components used in personal computers.
The company's stock was recently delisted from the New York Stock Exchange for trading below a minimum threshold of $1 a share, and now trades on the small-cap OTC Bulletin Board.
Earlier this year, SGI replaced its top executive amid widening losses and lower revenue. Last month, the company said it expected revenue of about $108 million for the third fiscal quarter, well below guidance of $140 million to $160 million.
SGI's press release here: http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060508/sfm098.html?.v= 45
"Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!" - Alfred E. Neuman
They went from a big player to off the map very quickly. My question is; where they contributing anything new to the maket recently and for that matter where there any advantages to using a SGI card? Not to be harsh but companys don't just go bankrupt usualy it has somthing to do with high level mismanagment.
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
So the question is are the SGI workstations worth the cost? Is SGI going to survive.
And for karma whoring here is the wikipedia index on SGI's history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics
I worked with IRIX at some point of my career. Nothing impressive, mind you. But the machine was stylish and the aura of "eliteness" leaked from every vent grill. Onyxes, Octanes, Origins... They could be beat by a low-level GPU these days, but back then, they were wet dreams coming true.
I'm sad to see them go. Not surprised, but still a bit sad.
Erwin will need a new home...
They'll add it in with green-screen later.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
...I'm surprised it took this long. After throwing over their own OS for NT workstations and losing the high-end specialty graphics market, they veered into supercomputers and bought Cray, which didn't help either company, and they haven't done anything interesting in years. RIP SGI
I know it was inevitable. I know the economics. I know various other things but still...still...it's a sad, sad day.
Cheers,
Ian
My question is; where they contributing anything new to the maket recently
It may not be all that "recent", but if you're a C++ programmer, you might want to download a copy of this documentation before the bankruptcy trustees pull the plug on the server:
Old age is the most unexpected of things that can happen to a man. -- Trotsky
I don't know; let's check their company for signs of health.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
I know the Stargate takes a lot of power, but surely the government's black hole account can take care of it.
Argh.
When your core business is high end and you push products through lots of R&D then have your market sapped by commodity products, its easy to overstep your budget and not adjust the business quickly enough. Even worse of course if the people in charge don't see the train comming down the tracks for a long time, which is what often happens in bigger businesses. SGI is also in a more vulnerable position than say Sun because Sun can deploy a server that is expected to stay put (and need support) for many years - hell even SCO is hanging on this way! The graphics industry is constantly in the push of new and faster, so we're seeing a "Unix" company demise in accelerated time.
Seeing as Inferno is shipped as a HW/SW package for SGI boxes only. I guess that's a niche product though.
Please remain calm, there is no reason to pani... wait, where are you all going?
I'm certain there are companies (no, not just one) we'd keep parties when we'd see them go down. I'm sure SGI isn't one of them.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
I remember fondly my first encounter with 3D graphics, from the TRON movies, man - that was many years ago, the SGI computers was the no.1 on my wishlist as a kid - but a machine like that where WAY too expensive, and thats where the Commodore Amiga came and stole our hearts, all of a sudden - 3D became affordable, SGI did'nt belive in "3D-for-everyone" and I believe that would be the main reason for their demise.
You've got to put your belief in the little guy on the street if you want to survive, being boss - playing big, with the big - will only work until the rest of us grow up. And we did, but SGI didn't invest in our future together, if they did - we would have embraced them without as much as a seconds hesitation, but if you keep selling to the elite party (those with WAY too much money) you're out of tune with the development.
(For those too thick to read between the lines - it simply ment, they didn't follow the times)
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Info about the Chapter 11 is up now, via a press release:
l eases/2006/may/sgi_reorg.html
http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_re
From the release:
"As part of this agreement with many of its major stakeholders, and as the next step in its previously announced plan to reorganize its businesses, the Company and its U.S. subsidiaries have filed voluntary petitions under chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. SGI's non-U.S. subsidiaries, including European, Canadian, Mexican, South American and Asia Pacific subsidiaries were not included in the filing; will continue their business operations without supervision from the U.S. courts; and will not be subject to the requirements of chapter 11. The Company expects to file its Plan of Reorganization reflecting the agreement shortly, and to emerge from Chapter 11 within six months."
640YB ought to be enough for anybody.
Will make those new look and feel updates to Slashdot all the more easy to create.
My SGI shirts are now collectors items!
Woooot!
Chip H.
Chapter 11 Bankruptcy is not all that bad. I survived a company that went through this. Basically you renegotiate your major debts, likely a bank; and all this little creditors will likely get a pittance. Also, this makes them really very ripe for a quick sale at a very discounted price. They can come back bigger and better than ever without too much pain. I imagine a Google, or a Novell, or a Sun, or a Red Hat might be interested in a quick buy.
Using the Freedom of Speech while I still have it.
Almost 10 years ago, I had the use of two packed-to-the-gills Reality Engines, one supplied by Nintendo when I was doing game AI work and one by Disney when I was the lead on a virtual reality prototype.
I am not a computer graphics specialist, but it was great to work with full screen graphics at a high frame rate. The artistic types at Angel Studios where I worked created amazing 3d models, textures, and environments - really, some of the most fun I ever had working.
I remember being amazed at the XZ 3D hardware capabilities of the Indy - the first SGI I had the freedom to play with. This was back when I was still dazzled by the breakthrough of DOOM! There was no company better positioned with *real* intellectual property to get involved in the PC graphics market. I don't think they have the economy of scale to come back from this, but they'll certainly leave an impressive legacy. They actually made great tools, rather than 'solutions'.
SGI began its rapid decline the moment the announced the merger with Cray. As the stodgy crew of maanagers went on the land grab trying to justify their existence in their "new " company, it drove out many of the long hair, fast and loose crowd of exceptional engineers who believed SGI was a magical place.
SGI truly was a magical place to be. Not only the "Its Not just a job, Its a wardrobe" pens, frisbees, t-shirts for every new product, boxer shorts, key chains, and all the other swag SGI marketing was famous for. The "O" series of products, led by the Indigo2 Max-Impact were revolutionary products. Massively fast backplanes that still exceed the performance of all but a limite few systems, incredibly fast graphics sub systems with fill rates that still can't be achieved on lowly PC gear (they just can't push the bits fast enough).
In addition, SGI truly owned the internet space, well before Sun and then gave it away once Sun started the "dot in dot.com" marketing campaign. They had the NetScape server, free, included with the IRIX OS, on every server with a full HTML configuration interface in an age where most other companies still didn't have an officially supported HTTPD for their platform. They also included Indigo Magic, the FIRST full GUI HTML editor, again, free with the OS, as well as a full GUI VRML editor, and so on.
I truly weep for the company SGI used to be. It was the best job I ever had and the one I wish had never ended.
Armaments, 2-9-21 And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade' N
I know 3dfx wasn't loved by SGI especially but when it went chap 11 like this, first people to comment some insightful comments were John Carmack like industry people saying it is NOT a good thing.
People (users) were speaking about stupid "16bit rendering" while they saw the real thing coming as duopoly between Nvidia and ATI.
Now there are 2 companies and ATI is more focused on laptop chips now.
Who lost? Customers.
There will be always insightful morons around but it is the case mattering for the professionals, especially Holywood and major TV channels.
Tell that to Steve Jobs..
hemi
Heck, I use a Powerbook G4 for most of my tasks these days and my SGI O2 and SGI 320 NT box in my office are used little these days, but the Macs do lack some advanced hardware features that are only available on Infinite Reality gfx boards and Tezro v12. See Discreet's website and you'll notice that Flame, Inferno and Fire still run on ONLY SGI hardware. SGI InfiniteReality boards are used as image generators for flight military flight simulators and also to drive the Inferno compositing and film mastering, using up to 32 film resolution layers and 10-bit anti-aliased graphics
Sure, Nvidia and ATI cards go have an polygon count advantage and they do have features like pixel and vertex shaders, but overall for high fidelity graphics one still goes back to SGIs. If one looks at what is capable in Final Cut Pro HD, it still falls in terms of output quality compared to what an SGI can handle. For video DMediaPro options with support for two streams of high-definition 10-bit 4:4:4:4 RGBA video. Or if one needed to generate your own video signal. Programmable FPGA video card or drive a C.A.V.E. or Powerwall SGI Mutichannel Option cards are capable of doing this. I have yet to see PC based Image Generator be as successful at doing this without a lot of hacking, blood, sweat and tears. SGI's handle the tough visualization tasks do out of the box. SGI's gfx API are second to none
OpenGL Inventor
OpenGL Multipipe (+ SDK)
OpenGL Optimizer
OpenGL Performer
OpenGL Shader
OpenGL Vizserver
OpenGL Volumizer
ImageVision and Image Format Library (IFL)
SGI was a great company, although it was badly mismanaged. I'd love to see it merged with Apple and all the SGI gfx API's integrated into OS X. Plus other tecnologies like ccNUMA, XFS, CXFS, NUMAlink4 (6.4GBs), NUMAflex combined with Hypertransport and Infiniband (when customers need cheaper solution than NUMAlink)
I hope that someone will buy their MIPS-based workstation-business. What I would like to see is for someone to take that business, beef it up a bit, and port the whole lineup to Linux. I would say that there would be a sizeable market for quality MIPS-workstations that run Linux.
How about.... HyperTransport-links between CPU's, integrated mem-controllers, on-die L2-caches, HTX-expansion, multicore, multi-CPU-setups. All this, and running Linux. Hell, those changes alone would give us a nice boost, even if the CPU-core (R16000A IIRC) itself stayed relatively same.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Obviously the OP didn't read SGI's official release...
Man, what a shame. I've been a fan of SGI for quite sometime and it's unfortunate to see something like this happen. Hopefully they can climb back out.
[%] Cingular Ringtones
I never worked for SGI, but I loved the spirit of the company and their products.
I think (and thought at the time) they should have focused on a cheaper version of their products and tried to be an Apple alternative. They had the best OS out there until MacOS X came up, and it took a long time for MacOS X to work as well as Irix did. Most people aware of the company had very warm feelings about SGI products and the OS and I think they could have used that.
I reluctantly wound up switching from SGI hardware (used Indigo2s could be had for reasonable prices) to Macs about when MacOS X came out.
In the early 1990s, SGI's Indy system became wildly popular. While still being relatively affordable relative to PCs of the time, it provided a very solid workstation. You could get the power of IRIX and acceptable graphics at a fraction of the price of their higher-end systems.
For many, the Indy proved to be a gateway system. Developers or graphics artists would purchase an Indy, become quite happy with it, and then go on to purchase higher-end SGI hardware when the need arose.
The Opteron provided an opportunity for them to repeat that feat. They could have released a low-cost, high-quality workstation based around that CPU. Had they beaten Sun, HP, and others, they could have had a large chunk of the market. They could have even used the distinctive blue/teal case of the Indy to appeal to former users.
In addition to that, they could have tweaked a system such as FreeBSD to run very well on their new Opteron-based system. Unfortuantely, IRIX development has lagged recently, and is just not up to par with other UNIX systems of today. FreeBSD, however, with SGI-specific modifications could have proved to be a real winner.
SGI did not own the Internet space. Just because they had those on their platform doesn't mean they "owned" anything.
Mosaic - and shortly afterward, Netscape - was on every platform you can name. Httpd was supported on all those platforms too. By the time the "Internet revolution" and all the hype (and corruption) that drove up the stock market in the 90s, SGI was in the beginning of it's decline.
Sure, they had a great campus, they had great people working for them, but it didn't take long for it to come crashing down around them.
Which is unfortunate. SGI was a pretty cool place.
...for our file and web servers, but we are moving to Sun. The SGI's have been incredibly stable, but their JRE is out of date and the JVM core dumps frequently.
I'm using this on a couple of machines. I sure hope that somebody will continue to maintain it.
This bankrupcy doesn't surprise me at all. I saw this coming for more than five years. But I remember having arguments with SGI fans who tried to defend the Indefensible.
Nah big corporation == evil. If SGI had even 5% market share we could still talk about how bad Irix sucks and how SGI rapes you price wise. If Microsoft goes to 5% we can wane nostalgically about how great it was having the office suite always use the new technologies from the OS.
With a Chapter 11 reorg, a potential buyer would get access to a lot of very interesting HPC technology, without a lot of liability. This is what the current bondholders are counting on - buy it while it's cheap and sell it for more to some other company.
What do you get (of any value) when you snap up SGI?
-XFS/XVM/CXFS - one of the best storage environments out there in production
-OpenGL/VAN
-DMF/TMF
-GRIO
-Numerous other subsystems to IRIX/Linux
Their hardware hasn't kept pace as well. However, there's still a lot to like about the architecture (HyperTransport looks so much like SGI-Craylink). They're about the only ones who managed to make something useful of Itanium (another straw on the camel's back). Perhaps someone could do something with it, provided they supply the needed R&D money.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
how can you possiblly spam /. and forget to mention that Gary Coleman appeared twice in Buck Rogers. You can't even spam well, tisk tisk tisk.
Well at least *some* of the employees will get to keep their jobs, but I'll bet the ones with their retirement plans in SGI stock will be hopping mad.
... to mirror the STL progammer's guide (for personal use, of course).
It's sad to see them go, and not just for their cool h/w. This is the company that brought us OpenGL and, for a long time, the only useful STL documentation on the web (not to mention Irix had a working c++ compiler). I can almost forgive them for IRIX 6.5.
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
I am sorry for SGI breaking down. But I hope that Apple can learn from their mistakes. It's too late for Sun I guess.
I shall remember you, SGI, and I will think of you every time I play with my future girlfriend.
I read that as "SG-1 files chapter 11 bankruptcy." I was wondering how a TV show could go bankrupt
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
This looks like a pre-packaged chapter 11. The management has already put together financing and the outcome is nearly predetermined. 6 months in a chapter 11 is way to short for anything else. This should allow them to dump some debt, restructure some, and emerge in far better shape.
No one here gets out alive
I bought a few of their systems, ranging from an R4400-based Indigo2 to an R12K based Power Challenge L. I was usually happy with the hardware, but the sales guys were really slimy, and the company made it very difficult and expensive to get basic OS and compiler updates.
A $3000 Indy might have seemed like a good deal, but when you need a thousand dollars a year worth of hardware and software contracts to support basic administration of the box, it didn't compare too well with its competition.
Of course, my POV is probably severly tainted by the fact that I just did NOT like the sales rep. Half of what came out of his mouth was BS.
On the other hand, this had to have been 10 years ago, and I should probably just get over it.
I thought that said SG "one" when I first saw it, and I was like: "what! how am I supposed to learn about Origin now? at least we have Atlantis" good thing it's just SGI and not SG1
IIRC, doesnt microsoft hold a good amount of ownership over opengl? and now that SGI will more than likely be leaving the playing field, wont this mean that OGL will belong to microsoft? who will more than likely take it, lock it up, and sue the living fuck out of anyone who implements it? (read, makes free software implementations without paying absurd royalty costs)
of course, this is where OSS, years ago, should have started on a similar, but relatively OGL patent-free alternative.
What's going to happen to OpenGL? The API can't die! I don't want to have to use DirectX! What will I use in Linux?
SGI Takes Action to Reduce Debt
SGI Announces Pre-Negotiated Reorganization
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., (May 8, 2006)--Silicon Graphics (OTC: SGID) today announced that it has reached an agreement with all of its Senior Secured bank lenders and with holders of a significant amount of its Senior Secured debt on the terms of a reorganization plan that will reduce its debt by approximately $250 million, greatly simplifying its capital structure.
As part of this agreement with many of its major stakeholders, and as the next step in its previously announced plan to reorganize its businesses, the Company and its U.S. subsidiaries have filed voluntary petitions under chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. SGI's non-U.S. subsidiaries, including European, Canadian, Mexican, South American and Asia Pacific subsidiaries were not included in the filing; will continue their business operations without supervision from the U.S. courts; and will not be subject to the requirements of chapter 11. The Company expects to file its Plan of Reorganization reflecting the agreement shortly, and to emerge from Chapter 11 within six months.
Read more at http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_rel eases/2006/may/sgi_reorg.html
Jakob Breivik Grimstveit
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by."
and they gave the entreprise system to Sun, who sold them like hot cakes.
It's a shame, because back in the early 90's I got into comp sci and computer graphics, using Indigos and Onyx machines in all my early work. I even bought an Indy for use in college, and there's no way I would have been able to do such cool project work in school without it. It's a shame to see this, because I was as big a fan as SGI could have had back in the day, but I know the day SGI started its decline.
;-).
It was SIGGRAPH 2000. New Orleans. I got an invite to the SGI party, and we were all expecting a huge new announcement of a SGI-brand PC graphics card. This would have been the smart move, because about this time PC cards were starting to eat into SGI's markets... So why not use the amazing brand name of SGI and produce a killer PC card? So what did SGI announce? A new line of supercomputers. There were audible groans in the crowd.
Oh well, it was part of history. My Indy still works just fine, and I was even able to update to a newer version of Irix recently... And I'll still wear my SGI shirts, thankyouverymuch
--- witty signature
I'd say their biggest mistake was bringing in Microsoft henchman Rick Beluzzo, whose philosophies didn't do much good for the creative and adaptive market that SGI was selling to.
I remember an SGI employee countered this with "We are the : in http:"
I will miss you, SGI. Thanks for your substantial contributions to Linux.
Regards,
--
*Art
From where I sit, SGI are primarily a high performance computing company, hence their Altix range. The problem is that 95% of HPC problems run just fine on a cluster, and there just isn't enough business in the 5% of us who's problems realy need a single-system-image machine.
Nah, their real decline came with the rush to put out x86 Windows NT workstations. Any PHB would look at the cost, and say "Why can't we just get a Dell and save thousands?" Bang, instant deathknell.
Hmm, an old-school *NIX vendor convinced to switch to x86 Windows NT workstations, dropping their RISC processors and OS; now where have I heard that before?
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
If you cant really *move* in a lively and limber way when your survival depends on it - to either keep up with the times or keep out of an alligators jaws - time rolls on without you.
If a company spends its days _anchored_ in a particular mode of operation, the fickle stream of "what's current" will erode their foundation, no matter what or who they represented.
To quote Jerry Reed, "When you're hot, you're hot - when you're not, you're not."
There's a whole list of computer companies who were assimilated, died a horrible wilting death, or weirded themselves into extinction.
There is nothing that ranks higher than a grudge in the world of personal motivators. I wish sales people, especially software sales people, would read Slashdot to see posts of frustration like this one. You can't walk off a used car lot and start selling high tech gear and hope to get repeat business.
They should have worked more on low cost clustering, imo, and they definetly should have bought Nvidia.
it's a serious question, can anyone here say how serious? I'm quite sad to see sgi go aswell, sadly nothing is forever.
No, whether they are worth the cost has never been the question. A business man might not think that a $80 camel hair brush and a $120 tube of pigment is worth the cost, and balk at the artist demanding this instead of the much cheaper alternatives. Of course, the workstation isn't worth the cost, but that's never been the issue. The question is whether the combination of the workstation and the person working on it is worth the cost, and you can't get to that by adding numbers.
Will they survive? No. I'm sad to see them go, but there's no room for enthusiast driven enterprises in this day and time, where humans are seen as expenses and innovations as magnets for frivolous lawsuits. Plus, there's no way for SGI to shift back to what they once were. The people just aren't there anymore.
Regards,
--
*Art
Is this the golden opportunity for Microsoft to shut down OpenGL and Make Direct3D the One True Way to do graphics? Before anyone else says "antitrust", THIS administration wouldn't stop it.
Enquiring minds are curious.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Sorry, the first web browser was also the first "full GUI HTML editor." WorldWideWeb.app by Tim Berners Lee.
sun is next !
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold
Like I said elsewhere last year,
:-)
A few days after SGI was delisted, I stumbled across an old (1994) article about SGI while I was poking around in one of my favorite places, the Wired archive.
(I'm a huge computer history junkie--if nothing else is happening, I can amuse myself for hours digging up old computer stuff on the web. And if you're ever in the San Francisco Bay Area, I highly recommend visiting the Computer History museum.)
Anyway, the article has this quote from SGI founder Jim Clark:
Clark is not afraid to publicly dis a company like Apple, much as Steve Jobs once mocked IBM.
"Apple," Jim Clark will sigh, as if he were talking about a horse on its way to the glue factory. "They're not doing anything... Apple blew it."
Then, with a dismissive wave of his hand, and just the hint of a grin: "I think they're in serious trouble."
Funny how things can change in 12 years.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Damn trolls.
I'm pleased to be on record as the first to predict the demise of SGI. On the day they announced the acquisition of Cray (in Feb of 1996), I told everyone around me at LANL that it was over for SGI because they didn't have the financial wherewithal to support their own operations while shoveling hundreds of millions of dollars into the Cray sinkhole.
Does anybody know where I can still get one of the chrome-plated, die-cast metal SGI logo cubes? My boss had one back in the late 1990's as a desktop paperweight and it was so cool.
Quite frankly, you are blaming the symptom and not the disease. The market for UNIX Workstations had pretty much dried up to nothing, and SGI was already going in the crappper. Going with Wintel was a last-ditch attempt to stay in the market.
Look at all the success that Nvidia (former SGI people) has had with Wintel graphics. SGI's problem was just poor execution.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Did SGI ever create a version of IRIX that ran on x86 hardward? Was it available for download like Solaris/x86?
I think it would have helped them.
Also, why did they change their name from the ultra cool name of Silicon Graphics to SGI?
My father used to work for defense research and they used a lot of SGI machines. One day the SGI showcase vehicle came to the research facility and I was granted permission and clearance to go and see it with the rest of DRE staff. It was a huge pure black 18 wheeler and in the trailer was their "demo area".
I got to use a flight training simulator running on a 32 processor Onyx (f'ing beautiful machine) with three 21 inch monitors. Even today it would still be cool just for the 32 CPU SMP and multimonitor gaming/training, and I saw all this around 1992.
Then it was on to some 3D workstations running wavefront. I had come from the C64-Amiga-PC branch of our computing family tree. I had even worked with the video toaster & lightwave at college, but nothing has impressed me more then seeing wavefront running on an SGI. My little 486 DX2/50 rendering a 800x600 Imagine3D image in six hours looked rather pathetic to say the least!
Even though most of the software today has far better features and output, I'll always think of the SGI as the pinnacle of 3D rendering. That's probably because of the huge impression I was left with because of SGI & Alias.
There are only 10 kinds of people in the world. Those that understand binary and those that don't.
While Chapter 11 doesn't mean the company is dead (heck, airlines in chapter 11 are even merging these days) it would be very sad to see SGI go. One of the coolest things for me is the single system image computing, for example their Altix single system image supercomputers. High end scientific computing in the US has really thrown its weight behind clustering with off the shelf components (or, in IBM's case, custom components) working together over relatively slow interconnects. While this does work really well for types of problems that can be easily partitioned, not all problems can be easily dispersed. Additionally, many times researchers may not be the most proficient in MPI or other styles of programming that are really key to working well in a clustered system.
Single system image supercomputing offers a way to tackle some problems that can't be partitioned and also to make life easier for scientific programmers who are not well versed in distributed computing theory and practice. It would be a shame to see one of the last companies with that design philosophy disappear along with the technology and will to continue to implement supercomputer designs that don't follow the latest "fad".
ed
I think (and thought at the time) they should have focused on a cheaper version of their products and tried to be an Apple alternative.
Actually they did this, showing off an Indy running Photoshop at MacWorld one year. I don't know how serious they were about it.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
SGI made some rock solid products. I still run NFS servers off of indigo2's with 1 year+ uptimes. Octane's and Octane2's are still used as workstation where I work too. They were probably the first to use heatpipes in their coolers for their graphics XIO boards. If you need to replace anything, it's all modular, and you can take the whole things apart and replace each single component. I love the box designs too (though they way a ton). I hope they will still continue to be dominant in HPC. If you haven't run programs on a 8 way Altix / Itanium2 you don't know what you're missing.
Of course most people, when writing about the demise of cray, point to the ponytailed hippies from SGI who spent money like it grew on trees, and hadn't a clue how to sell into a competitive market, make compromises, or actually build things that the customers actually wanted.
.com boom.
SGI also really shot itself in the foot in the internet server market. They released really great hardware for the task, particulary the challenge-S, which was fast and affordable. However, they had real reliability problems and supply chain problems. (I've never seen so many computers catch on fire, as the octane) They managed to cause a lot of problems for their users at the beginning of the internet boom, and lost themselves a lot of mindshare in the market. Sun managed to build up enough mind-share that they are still relevant, despite the end of the
A company that was universally focused on cool technology, but without much of a care for what could actually be sold into the market, and what it would cost to do so.
Sad Sad day. I worked for them for almost seventeen years (under 1000 Employee #).....laid off about three years ago. Best company I ever worked for, and a great place to be. Some of the sharpest engineering folks I've ever seen, and the most idiotic management on the planet. The only reason SGI survived as long as it did was due to their exceptional technology (on many levels), but because of the fools at the helm, it didn't have a chance to succeed. As far as I'm concerned, even though hit continued to rise for a few years based on pure technology...the fall really started when Dr. Clark quit in frustration and went off and started Netscape.....he was the true visionary and the "Core" of the Old SGI, but the board of directors wouldn't let him take the company where it really needed to go. It's never good to dwell on what might-have-been, but in my opinion, Silicon Graphics had the potential to totally dominate and change the direction of computing as we know it at one time, but because of pure bureaucratic idiocy, was basically strangled in it's infancy. What a waste.
"...R12K based Power Challenge L"
Sir, such a product does not exist. I think you must have dreamed it.
The Power label was reserved exclusively for R8000 workstations and servers, and the Challenge series never supported R12K processors.
Actually, nVidia IS the old SGI Graphics engineering division for all intents and purposes. When Belluso came in and decided that SGI would no longer be a graphics company - the Graphics engineer went off and started nVidia....
What's the backplane speed you refer to?
This say the GIO64 backplane speed in Indigo2 was 266MB/sec.
This was probably great then, given the limitations of FPM RAM (EDO wasn't even around yet!), but it is peanuts now. Intel's FSBs and AMDs HTs hover at about 30 times this speed now, and there are plenty of slots which exceed this speed too.
Am I missing something? I only looked this up because the amount of time SGI has been out of the loop pretty much means that their systems cannot be anything special compared to current hardware. That doesn't mean they weren't ahead of their time, just that a lot of time has passed and even things that were ahead of their time then are nothing special now.
I had a couple friends who work at SGI and I was heavy into the computer graphics market then. SGI were doomed before they bought Cray. They basically started by taking the work of Evans & Sutherland and bring it to a whole new marketplace. They realized the potential of computer graphics in a broader market, not just defense and similar companies. The problem was, the market was even broader than SGI expected.
Oddly, it was the horrible Matrox Mystique video card that signalled the end for SGI. It wasn't the first 3D PC card, but for many people, it was the first one they owned and used. It ran Tomb Raider with 3d acceleration. These kinds of cards created a whole new market for 3D hardware. This board marketbase pumped money into these companies (Matrox, ATI, S3, and soon after, NVidia) very quickly. And this allowed them to advance their hardware rapidly to the point where a well-equipped PC could match the 3D performance of an SGI box.
SGI was addicted to selling $80K workstations in small numbers, and PCs running 3D Studio Max that could be configured for a bit over $10K just overran them. SGI refused to adapt. Because of their overhead, perhaps it was impossible for SGI to adapt. So SGI was in a marketplace where a 3D workstation could only fetch $10K (and falling), with a business model and overhead (like owning your own CPU designer, writing your own OS) that made it impossible for them to compete.
End of SGI.
I don't understand your assertion that SGI was an internet player. The cost of their systems meant you couldn't afford to buy an SGI for anything that didn't involve heavy graphics, or else you'd be wasting your money. SUN really did rule the roost there, for a while. Until a broad switch to PCs whomped them too.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Investor News: SGI Takes Action to Reduce Debt [more]
We've secretly replaced Slashdot with new Folgers Crystals - let's see if it notices.
They also included Indigo Magic, the FIRST full GUI HTML editor, again, free with the OS
That's a pretty stupid statement considering the OS was anything but free nor was the IM code open-source.
SGI machines were great, but they were pricey and eventually lost out to cheaper/open-source alternatives.
A long time ago, when SGI was the darling of the industry and Apple was being lambasted I was fond of pointing out that the same things journalists said about Apple could be said about SGI: niche product, niche market, limited software selection, nice looking hardware but...etc.
The problem is, Apple stopped being like Apple and SGI never did.
I always wanted an SGI workstation though.
Think Sun will be next? If it is, what are we doing to use to replace the dot in dot-com?
Skot Nelson music is my saviour / i was maimed by rock and roll
Yes, the acquisition of Cray was a disaster from beginning to end, but that was an effect, not a cause. Management correctly anticipated the time when SGI could no longer survive purely as a make of cute little graphics workstations, and did the only sensible thing: used their early success to expand into new markets. Its the fact that they bungled that expansion that killed SGI, not the expansion per se.
If they had tried to maintain the "magic", as you put it, SGI would have died that much sooner. To survive, a company has to build a solid market. Providing a playground for creative people is at best a means to that end.
More importantly, some of those brilliant engineers who left the company ended up starting one of the companies that really put the nail in the coffin of SGI: nVidia.
SGI was a great company, but the management really went off into crazytown around the mid 90s or so. When your management is bad, the good people start to leave, and pretty soon you're left with just a shell of a company. Then it was one bad decision after another, buying Crey, hiring a CEO (for way too much money) with a proven track record of trying to turn companies into Windows PC companies, falling behind the technology curve as PC graphics cards get better at an amazing rate, and so on.
I was waiting for the day when SGI released a big box with a super-fast backplane (which is the one area where they still beat PCs) and graphics consisting of a ton of slightly up-rated PC graphics chips in a huge array.
I read the internet for the articles.
Well, I still use my SGI machines. I've an older Indy, that just is a file server and an O2 that still makes a great desktop machine.
Over the years, IRIX and SGI have been good to me. Thought I would put a few things down here that were worth it:
-never lost a filesystem. Many folks I worked with carried their configuration from machine type to machine type over the years. (indy, o2, octane)
-love the interactivity of the desktop. Still do actually. It's clean, fast and makes sense. The extra desks function is just great for administrating lots of PC machines these days. Just run vncviewer on as many desks as you have machines to handle and go. Since IRIX ignores ctrl-alt-delete, when running full screen one forgets they are not on the local machine at times.
-be sure and swing by nekochan.net. Great IRIX community who loves the machines.
My O2 is slow sometimes, but it sure corners well. One thing I just love about IRIX is it's task scheduler. Even when the machine is just hammered, it's interactivity remains very high. Wish we could see more of that in other OSes today. We do, but it just does not feel quite the same.
-Red mouse pointer! Brilliant, have made a set for every OS since.
OS documentation! Oh man, if we only had that level of documentation for other Oses. Not only do you get to understand how your OS works, but also get an education at the same time. I miss the 'sgi way' of thinking about things the most sometimes.
My biggest peeve was with the 320 / 540 series machines. Shared memory like the O2, but with a nice fast CPU. (I know it's Intel, but who really cares?) That machine was gonna run Linux and it was going to be the premiere workstation with integrated video, massive textures on 3D models, etc.... Well, microsoft legal and sgi legal hosed that with the drivers necessary being buried for all time, right after the box was shown at siggraph...
Bastards.
Lots more to say, maybe later.
Blogging because I can...
I thought they were already dead. Or bankrupt. Whatever. (Yes, I know Ch.11 is not necessarily THE end.)
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
Yay.
As a long-time SGI stockholder, this is bullshit. I would have rather the company get sold up at auction as opposed to this bullshit. Specifically. "Accordingly, the Company believes that SGI's currently outstanding common stock and unsecured subordinated debentures have no value." As a former employer I was vested with shares that were valued at $24 a share. There's absolutely no point to those shares that I was vested when the stock was trading for pennies.
So basically, I've had five years of tax-write offs on a long-term held asset that's basically done nothing but lose money. As to the idiot who will inevitably post and say "WHY DID YOU NOT SELL", I already asked a CFP and was basically told that it would cost more to sell the shares than they would be worth as a tax write off.
SGI is dead, long live SGI.
I have to agree with this.
I was an employee at the time this fucking tard was hired. I've heard from various former co-workers that it was some kind of strategy to destroy the company from the inside, and the proof is in the fact that Rick actually works for Microsoft now as some kind of VP of something or other. His totally useless decisions destroyed the company from within, and what he didn't outright destroy he scared away with his shift to POS Windows NT machines. He ended up going to some other shithole company after getting fired from Microsoft. I imagine that's quite a feat. Someone else mentioned he went to Quantum? Is this a case of someone who shouldn't be allowed to wipe his own ass, let alone have any kind of management input in a company?
No room for enthusiast driven enterprises?? Hmm....Alienware and Voodoo are that way. Yes, Alienware got bought, but I can still get one. Gaming oriented PC's ARE enthusiast based and lots of companies sell them. 99 percent of the PC's out there are ok for alot of games except the newest of the new games.
SGI could have done some great things (release the source of IRIX??)but didn't.
Gorkman
any tools for downloading all of the STL site?
The main download page is here:
This is what I downloaded, plus the experimental C++ I/O Library:I used to do work for a program that bought tons of SGI hardware to replace an older system. I told them, at the time, that SGI was losing marketshare in its primary marketplace (computer animation, rendering, etc). I didn't see SGI being around much longer and urged them to reconsider and purchase from a company that would still be around in a few years. Well, you can guess the rest.
Nice to see them spending our tax dollars on hardware that is already obsolete.
This is not a troll, just a catharsistic reaction to stupid management on a government program.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
IMHO: They are doomed, but if the new CEO isn't just a "make it worth enough to pay off the debt" sort of guy, they could harvest the value of the Cray and SGI brands and parley them into a major product line once again.
Ah, maybe that's a good idea, just have Steve Jobs buy SGI. Wonder what that would look like.
FalconShould there be a Law?
My dual charcoal gray (modded to VGA) 17" SGI monitors, the Personal IRIS 4D/25 and Indigo system boards on my wall, and my O2 workstation will be shrouded in black today.
When I was 10 I remember seeing a demo of 3D shutter glasses on an SGI. I remember reading about C.A.V.E. I remember walking up to one of those big shiny black SGI demo trucks and being blown away by immersive 3D environments being rendered in real-time when my dads state-of-the-art Pentium 66 could barely push 1000 polygons at 320x240 x 24 fps.
SGI is not a company; it is a cult. It is the epitome of the euphoria of the '90s tech boom, and a beautiful abstract dream of turning pure computer engineering in to visual imagination. If it weren't for the concepts that SGI's engineers turned in to realities in the late '80s and early '90s, PC graphics of today would be a tiny gray fragment of what they are today.
As far as I'm concerned, SGI shouldn't live on as a crummy corporate entity with none of the spirit and attitude that made them great (I mean, they got rid of the spinning cube, fer gods sakes!). The memory of those such as myself who were indelibly impressed by the style and power of those SGI masterpieces will always remember those feelings of true awe they inspired, and we will seek them out again, on whatever platform is at hand. Whatever detractors may say about commodity hardware and performance levels, it hardly matters. SGI did it first, and they did it with *style*
I don't know whether to crackup or cry, well perhaps both. Typing this up I keep glancing to my lower right where my DEC Alpha that dualboots WinNT and Linux stands. What I could get installed on it under NT was quick but I wasn't able to get most programs I bought to install. It's been more than a year since I really booted it up to put it to use, but I'm hoping to setup a home network in two or three weeks as well as get and install a current version of Linux. If so then I'll start using it again.
FalconShould there be a Law?
and sue their way into happiness by claiming that Linux is based on SGI code.
Does SCO actually have any customers left?
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I was really looking forward to a new season.
SGI's was doomed by keeping to the proprietary hardware model. Sure it was great in the early 90's when graphics chips were MUCH less complex to design, but as soon as the likes of NVIDIA, 3dfx, Matrox, ect. came on the market with mass produced hardware it accelerated the development of these types of chipsets into the commodity. SGI made money off of making expensive custom hardware (IRIX was just another *nix clone) and to a lesser extent (but some would say had a much greater impact) software.
There was just NO way they could justify the same margins on expensive workstation gear when people could buy commodity PC's with Intel/AMD and AGP video cards.
Just my opinion of course.
All $32...just...GONE!
I think your analysis is mostly spot on, but I'm going to disagree with your specific choice of 3d chips. I don't recall that the Mystique was ever more than a bit player in the PC graphics card market. I think the instigator of the 3D revolution in PC graphics was the 3dfx Voodoo graphics chip. It was the best performing consumer level 3d chip when it was released, and it propelled 3dfx into a leadership position in the rapidly evolving PC graphic card market. It also proved that people were willing to spend hundreds of dollars just for added 3d performance, which gave chip designers incentive to produce better chips.
If I was going to hedge my bets with an alternative I would go with an Nvidia chip like the original Geforce. Nvidia produced top performing chips that did both 3D and desktop graphics well. These chips were used for both high end gaming cards and low cost professional graphics workstations. Nvidia was also the first to combine top 3D performance with stable, high quality drivers for both major APIs (OpenGL and DirectX) on all major Windows platforms. Nvidia still dominates due to these factors.
I would say that Matrox lost their leadership position in PC graphics due to cards like the Mystique. Matrox didn't take 3D graphics seriously until it was too late. Their early cards performed poorly, and by the time they produced competitive silicon their drivers weren't up to par.
This is just to get rid of debt and stuff like that. The people who actually own the company believe there's great potential and they seem determined to do all it takes to turn the company around.
The current management is very different from the old one. It can be argued, and it has been argued before, that it was a succession of management mistakes which brought the company to its current situation. But the old mistakes seem to be a thing of the past now.
So, good engineering + bad management = financial difficulties. That's the past.
The present: good engineering + good management.
Stay tuned, there's more to this story than it seems.
I said it was the beginning of the end.
Tomb Raider with the Mystique was the first broad-market game with 3D acceleration.
Yes, I agree 3dfx made a much larger impact in the long run, parly because their output was so much better. But Tomb Raider was available before GLQuake, and I believe Tomb Raider was a lot more popular too.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Quick question: Mosaic Communications was cofounded by who? And what company did he come from?
That's right -- Jim Clark who came from SGI.
Mosaic Communications later changed their name -- any guesses as to what they changed it to?
Netscape Communications.
From the article at sgi.com http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_rel eases/2006/may/sgi_reorg.html/
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I remember that!
They had a huge booth at the MacWorld conferences for several years; at the time I never quite understood what they were doing or what their purpose was there, but I always went over to pick up the freebies and drool on all the gear I would never, ever be able to afford. (And probably wouldn't know what to do with if I could.)
Maybe I'll buy one used. Slowly, I'm buying all the computers that I couldn't afford when I was in younger on the used market for pennies. Kind of sad in a way; I was at a trade show yesterday and there was a surplus dealer selling old systems literally out of the back of a truck. Sun SPARCStations, and Ultras, old Green-and-white Macs, a rather beat-up Workgroup Server. I probably still have magazines advertising the launches of some of those around somewhere. It was kind of amusing to sit there and realize he probably had a few million dollars worth of gear if you went by MSRP, most of which was now scrap metal. (Seriously: they had a 88-gal. drum of Pentium II and III processors that were being sold for the gold in them to a refiner.)
I'll have to keep a lookout for one of those purple Tezro jobs when they hit eBay in a few years. Two of them would make a nice coffee table, with a piece of Lexan on top maybe.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I still have 100 shares :-) (They were worth less than the comissions would have been to sell them almost the day I wound up getting them through the ESPP.) I also have a certificate on my office wall stating that I am the proud owner of 5000 options to purchase SGI shares at a strike price of (let me look and stop laughing long enough to type) $29.875/share :-) They were underwater from the moment I got them, and never once came up for air.
This ch. 11 deal is (IMHO) the end result of a continuing and unbroken string of totally boneheaded decisions by Sr Management at SGI that started about 12 years ago and still hasn't let up.
The end of a once great and cool company.
Ian Ameline
AC - Mosaic, as in NCSA Mosaic, the original (which SGI had NOTHING to do with). I was not talking about the company that got started afterward, Mosaic Communications, that was forced to change it's name.
SGI - will the last one in the building please turn out the lights?
One could chart the demise.... Buy Cray, Sell E10K to Sun for a pittance, Divert from MIPS to Itanium, Rick Beluzzo, Bob Bishop, specialty markets, dumping $$$ into failed graphics products, IA-32 with custom chipset, market ignoring engineering driven crapshack.
You demonstrate a fundamental lack of undertanding of the business SGI was/is in, and what makes it operate. Distributing toys and clothing to employees and fans, and building the sexiest machines does not, in the long view, cause or ensure business success. Hype and excitement are poor substitutes for strong corporate leadership and industry leading innovation. In SGI's case, it never did have strong corporate leadership, but during its glory days it was so far ahead of the rest of the industry in its particular categories that such a fault could easily be overlooked.
A later poster was more on target -- SGI has failed in large part due to being unwilling to recognize the direction of the future. Graphics leadership was ceded to nVidia and ATI due to not understanding the concept of "good enough" and the future of PCs. Network serving leadership was entirely ceded to Sun. Investment in MIPS computing horsepower was sabotaged by the belief that IA-64 would be on-time and meet early performance expectations. SGI also failed entirely to capitalize on the movement of companies to databases and other such "mundane" enterprise applications, choosing rather to focus on HPC (and yes, this trend was already underway before the purchase of Cray, which merely jumped SGI ahead and accelerated the effect).
So, while trinkets and T-shirts are certainly enjoyable, the real reason that SGI experienced massive outmigration of engineering talent (but not complete -- the people left really are outstanding in the areas of their work) is that SGI failed to move into areas that were obviously ripe for the picking, and which these engineers realized would be terrific directions and interests to pursue. Can you fault a graphics engineer for deciding that nVidia/ATI/Matrox/etc were a better and more exciting fit for their interests? Or a CPU engineer for deciding that spinning clock rates on R10000 was less a use of their talent than working on custom ASICs at some small firm? Those trends, my friend, are much more important to engineering talent than baubles and doodads.
Cyrano de Maniac
So... does this mean no SGI Laptops?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Fuck you, you stupid shtinker! That comment was marvelous and you ruined it.
Rock solid as long as they weren't connected to the internet. :)
Irix always had a terrible security record.
As a workstation or internal server OS it was great though.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Don't you think 20$ is very expensive?
There are many game developers (especially Nintendo 2nd party) out there who have the highest respect for SGI.
GL (ie. OpenGL), Nintendo 64, STL, VRML.. all pioneered by that fantastic company. I just hope that everyone left finds somewhere with half as much know-how, attitude and insight. google??
As much as I have lost trust with the Wall Street Jounal --once a influential business newsletter now a shallow piece of yellow jounalism in my opinion-- SGID's reorganization could effect OpenGL's future. Sillicon Graphics, OpenGL's main contributor, could put the open API on the selling block. Hopefullly this won't happen. SGI is a good company. It just needs to clean itself up.
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
SGI hardware used to be cool. NVidia's proprietary shit is hardly impressive. I'm still waiting for the NVidiots to release the goddammed specs of their stupid proprietary hardware so I can actually use it on my FreeBSD/amd64 box.
SGI may have had bad management, but they have had ethical management. The SGI retirement plan does not even have SGI stock as an option.
Until recently, SGI had a stock purchase plan, but most SGI employees gave up on SGI stock as an investment vehicle a long time ago. Anybody who still has SGI stock viewed it the same way you'd view a single-number roulette bet. You're probably going to lose your money, but you might get lucky and get a big payoff on a small bet. If you owned SGI stock and were not prepared for it to become worthless the problem is not that the bondholders get paid and you don't, the problem is you're an idiot who doesn't understand the difference between stock and bonds.
SGI has been losing money for, what, 12 quarters? It's not like bankruptcy wasn't a possibility. SGI stock often moves 10% or more in a day - it's a volatile penny stock and investing in it carries a lot of risk.
If you buy bonds, you make 5-15% (depending on the grade of the bonds) if the company does really well and can lose most of your investment if the company folds, but you get a share of any assets at that point.
If you buy stocks, your potential earnings are unlimited, but if the company folds you get nothing.
Bondholders are owed money. Owners arn't owed anything. That's why bondholders get paid first.
Try telling that to Apple.
Think Deeply.
Not all Chapter 11 filings end up coming out of the Bankruptcy- many end up being converted into a Chapter 7 filing.
Which is SGI going to be?
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Nice to see someone else had this problem, and it's not just me reacting badly to my former Reps. Let's change their names, just in case they read slashdot, but I had "Jack", who looked like a slightly more dissapated Donald Sutherland from "Animal House" and made you feel greasy after talking to him, "Mark" who had been my DEC rep a month before, and used the sames spiel, but with "SGI" replacing "DEC" in his sentences (and who still didn't seem to understand what the product was", and "Joe", who was encouraging us to buy not only SGI's hardware, but their stock as well, as there was nowhere but Up for them to go. (this was in 1998, when it was obvious that for SGI, there was an alternate direction that had increasing possibilities).
This is where you can get nostalgic about SGI the hardware (the R10K PowerIndigo2 Solid Impact, for instance, or the 4 proc O200), but still wish to call SGI to the attention of the Dark Gods when you think of their reps.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
SGI is NOT dead... at least not yet, but the spirit of the old company I'm sure died long ago.
Chapter 11 US bankruptcy law allows for a company to reorganize to be profitable primarily by removing the debt owed. The caveat is that they need to prove to the court that removing the debt and any reorganization (e.g. layoffs, budgeting changes, etc) will return the company to profitability. SGI apparently thinks that they can return to profitability
If SGI had filed Chapter 7, that would be a different story - that means they have no chance of returning to profitability and are liquidating all assets to pay creditors.
Personally, I saw them on the decline well before the purchase of Cray, but that was probably because of my involvement in a CAD company where I saw the license dropoff about 1-2 years before that purchase (same thing happened with DEC when our Alpha and Digital UNIX licenses dropped off). Then the lack of pre-built software for their existing workstations (e.g. Mozilla) convinced me that they were dead in the workstation market, and their supercomputers weren't making much market noise where IBMs were making a lot of market noise and HPs were at least getting some market noise.
This is FUD, and most likely based on what was written in the manual to a well-distributed program (tcpwrappers) by a respectable programmer (Wietze Venema). However, this was written about old versions of IRIX, which have been retired for a decade now.
IRIX was one of the first operating systems to get US security approval in its incarnation as Trusted IRIX, and was also one of the very first systems to incorporate Posix Access Control Lists (ACL), which most of today's systems STILL don't have by default. And security bugs? Plug in SunOS and IRIX in Bugtraq and count the results for each.
Overall, IRIX is no worse than others. Yes, they did at first deliver systems that were insecure by default (lp account with a shell and no password, for example), but back then the target groups for the systems were not likely to be concerned with security. Times changed, and IRIX did too. IRIX 6.5 is a completely different beast than 4.0, just like Windows XP (ptui!) is a different beast than Windows 3.1
Regards,
--
*Art
Since lots of geeks seem to have a few SGI shares here and there, why don't we buy the company, design the ideal SGI laptop (get Twister out on DVD), retrieve 'CosmoWorlds' from the knackers yard and get building the 3D immersive web that those future generations truly deserve? If we buy 2-3 new wonder SGI tablet-laptops each, then the company could be kick-started and the preferred MIPS systems developed...
Why, if the UK Rover Cars can be sold to the Chinese, then surely the remains of SGI could be bought by an interested party - 'CERN' or some other E.U. science concern able to host Support PORTfolio (with all the files even for my VW320).
Culturally the demise of SGI is part of a bigger problem. The original Netscape - as bundled - was collaborative, and about writing pages and putting them up on your own IRIX server. Drag and drop ease without expertise required. Can anyone remember the awesome Hotmix demo disk with quite a few 3D worlds to visit? That amazed me, but seems to have been lost on the rest of the world. Nobody else made VRML as good as the demo disc and all the other tools fell by the wayside. Can anyone remember the Viewpoint wireframe model catalogue, and all those pretty good PC tools - 'Lightscape', 'Bryce', 'Painter 3D' and all the rest of them. Maybe all-of-SGI will go the same way, to not even have a homepage anymore. It is just a trend in our dumbed-down world...
"That doesn't mean they weren't ahead of their time, just that a lot of time has passed and even things that were ahead of their time then are nothing special now."
You hear that? That's the sound of an Amiga owner crying.
Where am I going to get support for my Iris 4D now?
(no joke, I'm using one as a coffee table, 'cause my back isn't up to lugging it out to the curb)
Wanted: One witty yet thought provoking
I think you have that backwards. Providing a playground is the end. All that money stuff is just a means to that end.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Hey eak, good to see you here.
There is a little blinking light here, saying "game over", insert more quarters to play.
The Magic Edge (tragic Edge really) was lots of fun. Everything about that company (before 1996) was incredibly cool.
Then we bought Cray.
The indigestion proved fatal to both companies (one of which was near death anyway).
Depends on whether you're a stockholder or a geek/employee. In any case, there's no playground if there's no money.
Luckily they didn't have software patent portfolio for the grim times (plan B)...
Imagine the fuss if they e.g. patented textured trangle rendering with perspective correction?
Though some would already be expired by now.
I told them [stupid management on a government program] , at the time, that SGI was losing marketshare in its primary marketplace (computer animation, rendering, etc). I didn't see SGI being around much longer and urged them to reconsider and purchase from a company that would still be around in a few years.
Wikipedia says, you were the primary market: Conventional wisdom holds that SGI's core market has traditionally been Hollywood special effects studios. In fact, SGI's largest markets in terms of dollars of revenue generated have always been government and defense applications, energy, and scientific and technical computing.
You also say, [SGI hardware] is already obsolete.
The same wiki article has some interesting things to say about Scalable Node computing:
This makes an SN system far easier to program and able to achieve a higher sustained vs peak performance ratio than non-cache-coherent systems like conventional Clusters or Massively parallel computers which require applications code to be written (or re-written) to do explicit message-passing communication between their nodes.
The same article goes on to say that SGI suffered from a nasty transition to Itanium at the expense of their own processors, which decimated their workstation market. If you were buying those, I suppose your were purchasing some hurting hardware. If you were buying clusters, who's did you recommend?
Finally, you claim: This is not a troll. Why bother with that?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You forgot to add "so there!"
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I have an Indy on my desk at home (been up for 207 days actually :)). Nice machine, even though it is slow at this point. I was disappointed that Adobe dropped them. sgi was really THE platform to do Web development on in the late 90's.
Then pony up a few million bucks to license all the necessary patents, rather than expecting them to give it to you out of the goodness of their heards, you greedy self centered prick.
They SHIPPED very insecure. The boxes could only be as good as the admin. All of the boxes I managed (I had 20 at one point, all of which were exposed to the internet -- down to about 7 or 8 now) were hacked when I arrived at the company. None of them have been hacked since.
Lots of the source of IRIX is not open-sourceable. Far as I know, there is a fair amount of ATT code in there.
and lack of Vision. Like a number of other companies, SGI lost all of those things and never regained them. They got cocky in an industry where you cannot rest on your laurels and slowed down when they should have taken the fast lane and branched from business machines into personal computers and reduced footprint server farms, among other things. But they hired a new CEO and he claimed things were going to get better and that was in January 2006. It's now May and they file for Chapter 11 protections, when's the fire sale? They need to restructure, retool, and come out of the gate flying like some of the simulators they've developed into a future that's bright and competition aware, but cooperative in verse. You don't have to always eat everyone else up, you can work side by side with them. When I was at PIXAR, we used SGI machines on every animation station desktop to do modeling and preliminary renderings, then things were shipped off to the SUN farm to render. SGI was a staple in there for the longest time. It would make for an interesting challenge to turn that company around, get the world excited about it and see it come back blazing a trail once again. Still don't hear that phone ringing. Someone's going to give me an opportunity to prove myself sometime in one of these and they're going to wonder why they did not make the call until the bleeding was so profuse. One of these days. Michael Murdock, CEO DocMurdock.com former Apple CEO Candidate 1997 (available to turn SGI around in 1 year, or less)
True, I should have worded my post better I guess. :-/
I haven't seen the Irix desktop in a while... Is it still Motif based or did they upgrade it to something more current ?
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Cray was spun off from SGI back in 2000 along with many of SGI's profitable enterprises. Tera, the company who bought it, took the brand with them. SGI today still has some supercomputer technology and know-how and the Altix was one of their few products making revenue for some quarters.
-Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase temporary safety deserve neither. -Ben Franklin
4Dwm. Looks something like Motif, I suppose, but somewhat unique. Hasn't changed too much since 5.3, which is where I got started.
8-way Itanium2 might have had some oomph over a year ago, but the delays in any new chips (and the coming dual core will run at slow speed) mean its competitors are now way out ahead. Just like SGI's MIPS machines, those Itanic of yours will be on eBay real cheap real soon